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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22826257">The Boy Who Lived</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caesia390/pseuds/Caesia390'>Caesia390</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 12:53:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,803</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22826257</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caesia390/pseuds/Caesia390</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of miscellaneous pieces exploring Harry's psychological survival (I use the term loosely) during and following his confrontation with Voldemort. Contains some sentimentality, rage, PTSD, and various iterations of fascination/attraction/repulsion centered on the person of Severus Snape. Oh and some necrophilia in there if you squint.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Harry Potter/Severus Snape</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Penance</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>xXxXxXx</p><p>It came to this: boot-steps crushing fallen leaves into the damp ground. Cool air filling his nostrils. His warm gloves and his cloak and the lake – still and silent, filling the crevice of the hills, pulling the clouds and the land and the trees and the sky into its reflection.</p><p>It shouldn’t have felt like comfort, this cold air he drew into his lungs.</p><p>It shouldn’t have felt like coming home.</p><p>But it did.</p><p>And that <i>he</i> should be here as well, too thin, too frail, a <i>man</i>, just a man, casting his own dark reflection among the other blackened, barren branches…</p><p>That shouldn’t have felt right, either, but that whiff of old hatred, sharp as the cold, that shouldn’t have felt right, shouldn’t have felt like <i>home</i>. More than the charred carcass of a castle behind them.</p><p>But it did.</p><p>“Snape.”</p><p>Spoken like a spell, conjuring life into the ghost, giving it the power to turn and look at him:</p><p>“Potter.”</p><p>That this being more terrifying than Voldemort, a thousand times more real and deadly and close and human… Should know his name. Should know him. Should speak to him.</p><p>The years had made no difference – not to the sallow skin and black eyes, not to the hair less silvered by age than Harry’s own. A dream. A nightmare. Years had made no difference to the conflict of fear and rage and betrayal and guilt Harry still carried inside him. After all these years.</p><p>“I wanted to beg you to forgive me.”</p><p>Snape raised a brow.</p><p>No – “I wanted to tell you – I know. I’ll never forgive you, but I know. Dumbledore… Dumbledore arranged it, at the end, back then, Dumbledore made it so that I would know.”</p><p>Snape turned his back to Harry, turned back to face the lake. “And it took you this long to summon me.”</p><p>No anger, and that was like a gift. Not that Harry had ever wished to avoid Snape’s anger – usually quite the contrary – but that Snape, at least, had outgrown the snares of mutual contempt and outrage that had bound them, for all those years: That was like relief. That was like hope, for Harry himself.</p><p>“I had a lot of things to deal with,” Harry said.</p><p>Snape had been near the bottom of the list.</p><p>“I had a lot of anger,” Harry said.</p><p>There were – there are – a lot of things… But Snape had not turned back to look at him. He was watching a pair of crows squabbling in the distance, graceful in the air, perched in trees, swooping out over the lake.</p><p>So this was all.</p><p>It should not have made it better, that in Snape’s mind, in Snape’s mind in Harry’s mind in this vision of the lake, there was nothing further between them – no festering recriminations underneath the scars. Not in Snape’s mind. He had moved on. He had forgotten the boy-hero who had been used and made to abuse him. Who had been crafted to undo him.</p><p>He held no resentments.</p><p>It shouldn’t have filled Harry with sorrow, that he could not feel the same.</p><p>But that was that.</p><p>Harry turned away. He could still sense Snape’s presence behind him, absorbed in the cold serenity of the countryside, comfortable in his thin black robes, in his death and his strength and his austerity.</p><p>Harry had to go.</p><p>He still had many more goodbyes.</p><p>XxXxX</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Penance</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>xXxXxXx</p><p>“You didn’t cry,” Hermione said. “You were all… blocked up inside.”</p><p>Before she’d tried to fix him.</p><p>Before she’d died, and Harry had to remember that it hadn’t been his wand, it hadn’t been his hand, it hadn’t been <i>his</i> rage that had killed her.</p><p>Though he had been so angry.</p><p>“If you don’t cry, it isn’t love.”</p><p>That was before the end.</p><p> </p><p>This was after.</p><p> </p><p>Victory.</p><p>The Boy Who Lived had defeated Voldemort, as prophesied.</p><p>It was over.</p><p>Now there was only Harry, and Harry had his own vendetta.</p><p> </p><p>He climbed a creaking, claustrophobic stairwell almost until it opened to the stars. Black and blue and the glaring pinpoints of light. Distant and cold. Waiting.</p><p>Halloween night.</p><p>The stairwell opened onto a crumbling balcony, and Harry of his own will let his own blood for the casting, held his own wrist over his own pentagram.</p><p>
  <i>Bring my Love to me.</i>
</p><p>It had taken Harry years before he would turn to Dark Magic, and years after that until it came to him as easily as the other. Years while all the boundaries broke down, and Harry the Man emerged from the ashes of The Boy Who Lived.</p><p>Blood and salt and tears and magic words.</p><p>Even Love. If Love was what it took.</p><p> </p><p>Harry camped on the balcony. He watched the hills and the rocks and the heather disappear into the horizon in every direction. He watched the clouds build and dissipate in the purple, blue, black, pink, pale and infinite sky. He watched the crows and the sparrowhawks vie. He didn’t watch for Snape.</p><p>He knew he didn’t have to watch. The spell was cast.</p><p>He warmed his food on a magic fire and huddled close in his cloak, wood and stone between his back and the sometimes howling wind.</p><p>He let his mind rest empty.</p><p>He breathed deeply and silently and closed his eyes.</p><p> </p><p>When he opened them, he saw Snape perched at the far end of the balcony, knees against his chest, frowning at the horizon.</p><p>“You came,” Harry said, and almost smiled.</p><p>“You could have chosen somewhere more hospitable” was Snape’s reply.</p><p>“I thought it was fitting.”</p><p>Snape have a short nod. “A fitting gravesite.” He turned his head a fraction to catch Harry with his eyes. “This is where you want to die.”</p><p>Harry shrugged. Looked away. “Kill or be killed.”</p><p>Then the heat of another man’s body close against him, and a wand digging into his throat. Harry closed his eyes.</p><p>“You were going to <i>fight</i> me,” Snape growled.</p><p>“I changed my mind.”</p><p>“How did you summon me?”</p><p>Eyes opened. Still that bold, liquid, killing curse green. “Why did you come?”</p><p>Snape didn’t answer.</p><p>Harry licked his lips, gulped in air now that the pressure against his throat had fallen away.</p><p>“It will never be over, Severus,” he said. “Between us. It will never end.”</p><p>Severus narrowed his eyes. “You hate me,” he stated, as if to clarify.</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>Then Harry smiled.</p><p>“Until we die, Severus. We’re bound together until we die.”</p><p>Snape turned to look out at the sky again, the movement like a sigh. He let his wand hand fall to his side, away from Harry. “Did a fortune teller tell you that?”</p><p>“I’ve learned a lot since Hogwarts,” Harry replied, grinning now that Snape couldn’t see.</p><p>“And you want us to die.”</p><p>“I want us both to have peace.”</p><p>“…A fine and quiet place…”</p><p>Harry stood as quickly as Snape stood, and he held Snape’s wrist, twisted it in his hand. “Don’t think to run away from me,” he hissed. “Peace, I said. I don’t want to keep chasing you.”</p><p>“You want me to kill you,” Snape accused.</p><p>“Either way.”</p><p>“I hate you.”</p><p>“...I know.”</p><p>xXxXxXx</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Rites of Spring</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>xXxXxXx</p>
<p>Spring seeped gently into Scotland in the months following the final battle. From the endless oppression of winter clouds, deadening snowfalls, to blue-and-gold sunshine alternating with days of drizzly rain. The air was cool and damp and carried on its breezes currents of fragrance. Heather, whin, nudiflora…</p>
<p>
  <i>April showers…</i>
</p>
<p>Severus was watching a sparrowhawk flit into the distance against the glowing evening sky. It wasn’t his usual custom to be <i>moved</i> by the weather, but this air seemed to taste fresher than any breeze he had sipped in his five decades of existence.</p>
<p>Clean. New.</p>
<p>Almost worth the price of a broken boy, so many broken lives.</p>
<p>Almost.</p>
<p>People were celebrating in Hogsmeade. Still. Continuously. With greater vigour now that Spring had come. As though they had needed the sunshine to confirm their freedom.</p>
<p>What they didn’t know…</p>
<p>But they didn’t care. The war had lasted so long that it didn’t matter to anyone how it ended, so long as it was over. Too many heroes had died. Another generation sacrificed. There was nothing left to hope for but the absence of terror.</p>
<p>Severus imagined he could hear the celebrations, if he strained.</p>
<p>He closed the window.</p>
<p>‘Severus?’</p>
<p><i>Potter</i>, his mind supplied, but Severus steeled himself as he saw the shadow in the doorway. Not Potter, not any more. Not Harry, either, but Severus <i>could not</i> force himself to think of the man he had come to know so intimately as My Lord.</p>
<p>And perhaps that, above all other reasons, was why Potter kept him. Close. Cherished.</p>
<p>The Potions Master inclined his head a fraction, waited for Harry to approach.</p>
<p><i>I am his security blanket</i>, Severus had once thought, and as odd as it was to think of the most powerful wizard alive as a small child afraid, it was no less odd to think of himself as something old, filthy, battered.</p>
<p>Cherished.</p>
<p>Harry didn’t ask, ‘What were you thinking about?’ voice hollow as that of an old king. He didn’t ask anything, but came close and touched Severus’s arm and looked.</p>
<p>And Severus let him. He couldn’t stop the flinch, every time, the first flinch at being invaded, but he opened his mind wide for Harry to see.</p>
<p>‘You pity me,’ Harry smiled, and his eyes were worn, glimmer dimmed with time, and this made Harry different from the other masters Severus had served. (Not useful but <i>cherished.</i>) ‘But don’t you see, Severus, that I wanted this? It had to be this way. This way I can keep the peace.’ His smile widening, saddening.</p>
<p>He was right; Severus had no pity for decisions made. The brand on his forearm that would never disappear, never completely disappear <i>from his mind</i> was proof of that, and Harry had pity enough for both of them.</p>
<p>Severus sometimes wondered if Dumbledore had started this way.</p>
<p>‘You have my permission to assassinate me if I ever start to become jolly,’ Harry once said, his words half-joking. The crooked smile Severus sent him in response was half a promise.</p>
<p>Never forget what it cost to get here. Never take people’s lives. Kill if you must, but do not steal their choices.</p>
<p>There were many vows that lay unspoken in the minds of the Master and the Advisor, as they were in the end, as they would become to what remained of their world when Harry slowly dismantled the structures of the Ministry and eased the public into a new Dictatorship (‘An honest show of power,’ Harry called it) under Harry’s rule.</p>
<p>There had been sacrifices. There had been deals struck and compromises.</p>
<p>‘It’s our world now,’ Harry had said. ‘They can’t hurt us anymore.’</p>
<p>The words only made sense when they eased themselves into the great bed in the room they had converted in the Astronomy Tower, two sets of scarred limbs tangling in the green silk sheets. The school had been a fortress in the end, and though Severus doubted it would abide the lack of students for long, for now it was Home; it was theirs. (‘This castle has always been my home,’ Harry liked to say, then peer at Severus as though daring him to contradict. But all Severus ever felt was a twinge of fond annoyance and an underlying throb of Mine, too.)</p>
<p>There would be factions, of course, that would oppose Harry, if there were none that had started or survived already. Sometimes Severus would hoist himself up on his elbows and tangle his fingers in the soft black hair, stare into the shadowed green eyes, and all he could see was the end of it all.</p>
<p>But for now… for now… They could pretend that they were free, that the power they (Harry) had seized had bought them freedom. (‘For both of us, Severus, I did it for both of us.’)</p>
<p>For now, for perhaps the first time Severus could remember, for this interlude, there was peace.</p>
<p>The spring birds were singing to the curse-free night outside their window, and they could sleep.</p>
<p>xXxXxXx</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Green as Leeks</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>xXxXxXx

</p>
<p>Hermione talks too much for Harry’s peace of mind. She is his friend, she stands by him, and for that he will always be grateful, but she asks questions and poses answers Harry doesn’t have the patience for - <i>Yes</i>, Hermione. The injustice of this and the solution to that, while the world moves sickly-slow around Harry, a pestilence of storms, and all the universes in Hermione’s mind are nothing to him next to his own infected existence.</p><p><i>Yes</i>, Hermione. Whatever you say, Hermione.</p><p>And it stops being secretly-sniggering funny when she starts yelling at him – You <i>must</i> pay attention, Harry, don’t you want to <i>live</i>? Her voice shrill and narrow in his ears.</p><p>And Ron is no support. A ghost that only Harry sees, drained of blood and life, stepping unseen and unseeing beside them.</p><p>Ron used to like Hermione. Ron would hug her sometimes when things were desperate, because he wanted to, because he liked the feel of her, while Harry felt the obligations of friendship and a vague, apprehensive understanding of female expectation.</p><p>Ron was brave, and Hermione was genius, and Harry was nothing but a snake – found pale and frightened in the corpse of a lion’s roar, and only fools and madmen didn’t doubt that he could bite.</p><p>Harry knows that Hermione depends on him, because Harry must win, or Ron wouldn’t have sacrificed himself to make it so. Harry must win, because if there is any way at all for him to do it, Hermione Granger will be able to fathom it out. Harry <i>must</i> win, and afterwards, only afterwards, will she allow herself the luxury of hating and blaming and reviling and forgiving him.</p><p>----------------------------------------------</p><p>Draco Malfoy is harder to peg. The more things change, the more it never changes. Harry is wiser now, can read the hesitation in the blonde boy’s eyes, and the challenge they have always exchanged is tempered, now, by distant stirrings of maturity – the world is bigger than their perpetual grudge, but that fact alone makes it all the more vital that they fight each other, and fight, and fight, because neither can win, but neither can lose, and neither can ever fall out of the game.</p><p>It’s relief, each time the insult goes answered. Not this time – not this time will I have to give up the charade.</p><p>Harry knows Draco’s loyalties are uncertain, and Draco knows that Harry knows, that Harry can read the fear and uncertainty in dishwater-grey eyes.</p><p>So it’s relief each time that insults turn to hexes, the most schoolboy-prank absurd, humiliating. No matter how complicated the world gets, we will always have this - hate hate HATE you, be you Voldemort or Snape or my own mad mind.</p><p>And Draco is master in every sneering insult and victim in every oozing end – incapacitation. And Harry is a warrior – effective, unkind. Victorious. Alive.</p><p>They encourage each other’s fantasies, though each knows the other’s flaws.</p><p>Draco is the opposite of Snape.</p><p>----------------------------------------------</p><p>Snape never gives up, and his malice never grows old. Harry learns to appreciate this when days bleed into nights and Voldemort <i>takes too long</i> and Snape, only Snape, can still find ways to hurt him.</p><p>‘It isn’t <i>easy</i>!’ Harry shouts, because he knows that Snape will sneer at him. He shouts it because here he can shout it, he can feel all the pain and the <i>sadness</i> at the unfairness of it all, and Snape will pierce him back together, bleed him to himself again.</p><p><i>I’m turning into you</i>, Harry never thinks within that dungeon. It’s only outside, where the colours are, that Harry feels the monochrome of bitterness seep into him, Snape’s lessons take hold. And Harry wonders what Snape thinks, wonders if Snape hates himself as much as he hates anyone, or more or less, and how Snape wishes things could be different.</p><p>Harry has never caught Snape in a fantasy, and Snape has never caught Harry in one. They feed off each other’s pasts and miseries and Snape is forging a determination for the future.</p><p><i>Hope</i>, you bastard; you still have hope.</p><p>And that knowledge is the bitterest learned – that Snape, of all of them, could fall prey to that fantasy, and that Harry, because he is Harry, because he is the fantasy, is the only one who can’t.</p><p>--------------------------------------------</p><p><i>I’ll live to see you dead</i>, Harry thinks, and the thought twists and bites him, because that’s what he does – lives. It’s his curse – he lives, so that those he loves may die, so that the rest of the world may have its Evil and its Hero. It all makes little sense to Harry, and he wonders why Voldemort wants power and adulation and eternal life, and if he had only asked for it, if he could have asked Harry without having to take it, if Harry could have given it – Here.</p><p>Because war is too costly, and Harry would kill all the makers of war if they weren’t his friends, if they weren’t his family and enemies.</p><p>Harry thinks that he did die, all those years ago, that the baby of Lily and James did die, and his mother’s sacrifice only called up a gollum – Darkest magic, because Harry does not think that he has ever had a life. And never will.</p><p>He would put flowers on the baby’s grave. One victim no one thought to mourn, and Harry feels only pity.</p><p>He has no need to Eat his death because he Lives it.</p><p>------------------------------------------</p><p>HERMIONE –</p><p>He finds her mind is restful when it sleeps. Harry touches her smooth, still brow, traces his fingertips across her soft, tangling waves of hair.</p><p>He will never think of her as beautiful – pretty, yes – but like this she is as cool and awe-inspiring as a marble angel, and Harry doesn’t hesitate to touch her, love, and be loved by her - her silence, her understanding.</p><p>He holds her close, and his dreams of Cedric are not so terrifying anymore.</p><p>------------------------------------------</p><p>McGonagall yowled at him in the hall, a flinch-inducing sound like a sudden tear in fabric, and Harry remembered that she had gone quite mad until he got a closer look at the cat and realised it wasn’t her, after all.</p><p>------------------------------------------</p><p>DRACO –</p><p>Harry only ever saw what Lucius saw, what Draco saw as a reflection of a reflection – what he was meant to be – when he was as solemn and as unperturbed as this.</p><p>A prince.</p><p>Harry only touches him to smooth his hair, straighten the satin tail of his robe, mindful of all the scuffles that ended in blood and bruises, filth from the corners of the floor.</p><p>He is proud, but serene in his pride, not the fiery desperation that lurked ever underneath Draco’s pale, imperfect surface. It shone through in the blue veins, in the wasp tongue and the crisp boot steps ever ready to spin hastily around and flee.</p><p>Draco feared and hated and envied Hermione, but without his fevered, desperate blood, without his twitching footsteps and without his mind, he is finally perfect and at peace.</p><p>Beautiful – what everybody seemed to see when they only glimpsed him playacting.</p><p>-----------------------------------</p><p>Ginny scrambled in once, shoes skidding on the stone when she saw – skidding around the echoes of her cries – ‘Harry! An attack! Harry!’ And in the shock, pure shock, but not revulsion, in her so-wide-open, silent eyes, Harry thinks to wonder how she got into the Chamber.</p><p>‘They’re coming,’ she was going to say, but her words failed at the sight of his Collection.</p><p>Harry nods to catch her attention. ‘I’ll be right there,’ he says, smoothing down the braid of a first-year Ravenclaw he’d once seen hex her ex-best-friend, over a boy, before they’d made up the next day (Harry used to watch them, sometimes, in his cloak, after he’d learned not to be cruel, not to resent what he’d never have.) She’d fallen in the First Breach, and Harry had remembered her smirk, her naughty smile, with her wand behind her back and her ex-best-friend tripped startled on the floor.</p><p>Ginny turns to him and nods, twice, blinks like waking pale and quaking from a nightmare, and she looks nowhere but his eyes until turning and running fast as she can back to the castle.</p><p>--------------------------------------------</p><p>SNAPE –</p><p>Snape looks old in death. It is as if he was always a corpse, and only the theatricals of his presence – his walk, his sneer, his mind, his whip crack everything – maintained the illusion of animation.</p><p>A minute dead, and Snape’s skin is loose and already shadowed by decay.</p><p>His robes collapse around a skeletal body – only hands, head, nose retain their living size.</p><p>Snape’s body is a puppet.</p><p>For the first time, Harry uses his wand, and the torso lurches up, and the head hangs and the greasy hair sways as though Snape has just awakened, hung-over.</p><p>‘You’re not dead yet,’ Harry hisses to it.</p><p>But the spell collapses, proving him wrong, and Harry remembers that Snape always triumphed in his failure.</p><p>===========================================</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Shards</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>SHARDS</p><p>Lucius has a wicked sense of humour. Harry laughs quietly to himself, taking notes, balanced on the corner of the couch.</p><p>What a perfect person to find after the end. His flabbergasted expressions when Harry does things like grab his full head of hair to pull him down.</p><p>How he never comes undone.</p><p>Harry has been trying to work on this assignment all night. It seemed the thing to do, after he single-handedly destroyed the Wizarding World: University. Right now it’s an analysis of some play or another, some mad King or another, and Harry throws aside the notebook to tackle Lucius in the shower.</p><p>The sex is brutal, but Lucius always stops it before it gets too rough. Lucius, despite all first impressions, doesn’t care for pain. Or perhaps he doesn’t care for Harry. Harry doesn’t care.</p><p>It’s the way he straightens himself afterwards, sneers at Harry’s flat without looking at Harry, sneers at Harry’s yellow-brown salvage shop décor.</p><p>It’s the way he always comes back.</p><p>Harry doesn’t know where he goes. He imagines it’s to some utterly mundane muggle job, selling lady’s formal dress. Some way for him to afford those expensive suits. There are no galleons anymore, no way to reach the goblins, no manor, no Narcissa on his arm.</p><p>There is no Draco to pin the future on.</p><p>Lucius laughs through the ice in his eyes. Lucius smiles with hatred so bright it burns. Lucius doesn’t speak but to insult him, and Lucius doesn’t allow Harry to speak.</p><p>It is so fine that Harry does not need to become a Dark Lord to have this power over him.</p><p>XXXXX</p>
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